Blurb Forums

GEDCOM (Family Tree) Slurping?

I have a large family tree saved in the usual form (a generic GEDCOM file) and I’d like to reproduce it in book form. 

The very basic (free) genealogy software from places such as Ancestry.com can produce a nice Word document with all the pertinent details, photos, etc and it also produces a table of contents!   Within a few seconds, I can have this in my hands.  What I don’t have is a way to print and bind it into a book.

Is there any chance that Blurb is looking into this for a future release?  If so, I’ll happily wait for the upgrade as it’ll be a HUGE task to manually copy and paste each page and photo into booksmart.

If anyone else has produced a comprehensive family history book from their GEDCOM file, can you offer any tips or tricks about how you did it, what worked and what you might do differently?

I may cross-post this to other boards on this forum just to increase the odds of getting an answer.   Regardless, I’d love to hear from Blurb staff too!

Donna

Hi Donna,

I can say that we’ve heard this request from a lot of people and it’s certainly on our list of features to consider. That said, we don’t have anything scheduled for an upcoming release.

Thanks for the suggestion. If there are others who echo Donna’s request, let us know here.  

– Kathy 

My wife and I used Family Tree Maker to do the first edition of our genealogy books back in 2000.  It allowed you to save the setup for any of the reporst it could make – lists of people, charts, photos, and the like – then put them in whatever order you wanted and print the whole mess out.  We made four, a book each for the lines going back from each set of grandparents.  We took them to a Kinkos to get photocopied on both sides of the page, then took the copies to a local bindery to get bound up – flat black with gold foil stamping on the cover.  (It was the same bindery that the U of M uses for getting doctoral dissertations bound up.  Any university town will have one, I betcha.)

I would love to have a way to do something similar in Blurb, but it would be a whole new area of expertise for the Blurb programmers to get into (reading in GEDCOMs, I mean.).  The shortcut for Blurb would be if it was possible to import a PDF.  It is pretty trivial to get the Word doc converted to PDF, and if BookSmart could take a PDF and turn it into a book, we’d be good to go.

I’ve been telling my wife that 2010 would be a good target date for release of the revised editions of all our books.  I bet I could get her to go faster if Blurb was an option.  The books we made before were packed with information, all in a very small font.  Terrible book design.  Blurb would be a lot nicer to work with.  (On the business side of things, the advantage there is that you have a built in audience of people who will buy the book.  C’mon Blurb, help us sell more of your product!)

Donna, you can order a family history/genealogy book directly from ancestry.com. I haven’t done it, so cannot offer any comments.

That being said, I personally would love to see Blurb offer this service…and I can’t believe that any company would go wrong in providing service to genealogists …we’re a strange bunch, but harmless :-)

Thanks for all of the comments and suggestions!   I know that GEDCOM files, from a programming standpoint, are extremely easy to work with so I don’t have any worries that complexity will be an obstacle for Blurb. 

My Ancestry.com generated reports are nice but the photos are low resolution (since I use thumbnails for my images so my huge tree will display easily on my family website).  If I printed a book, I’d want to replace those tiny pictures with larger ones and, probably, supplement with photos not included in my GEDCOM file.  That’s why I’d prefer the flexibility of Blurb (where you can move stuff around and use various page layouts) instead of Ancestry.com where I’d have to print what they produce for me.

Donna

Kathy, and all,

Kathy you commented on my earlier post about this topic:

http://forums.blurb.com/forums/4/topics/1905

I’d just like to add to the discussion: There are those who would make a family tree book if BookSmart had the templates. So add a slurp feature for GEDCOM files but also add the templates for those who haven’t use family tree software. PLEASE, pretty PLEASE (LOL).

Those of you who have used family tree software, this is a good time to discuss forms and template that BookSMart needs for creating a family tree book within BookSmart.

Love to see this in the next update (BIG SMILE)

Keep smiling

Hi,

I actually came to Blurb through my research on where to best create my genealogy family book, with photos, text, family trees and timelines.

The other companies are not offering at the moment the number of pages I would need and also quality of the photos and printing are important.

Adding features and designs supporting this kind of books would cement my decision to go with Blurb for my planned book.